It was not until many years later, while studying Ludwig von Mises’ text Human Action, that Thulsa Doom’s answer made complete sense to me. Mises, like Thulsa Doom, understood that power comes from action, and ideas are what drive human action.“Ideologies have might over men,” Mises wrote. “Might is the faculty or power of directing actions.”When Thulsa Doom, with a mere word, beckens a beautiful young woman to throw herself from a cliff, he’s showing Conan his power, or what Mises called “might.”“Might is the power to direct,” Mises wrote. That power, Mises understood, stems not from swords or “steel,” but ideas.“He who is mighty, owes his might to an ideology. Only ideologies can convey to a man the power to influence other people's choices and conduct. One can become a leader only if one is supported by an ideology which makes other people tractable and accommodating. Might is thus not a physical and tangible thing, but a moral and spiritual phenomenon.”This is what Thulsa Doom meant when he says it’s not steel that’s strong, but flesh. The person who can use ideas to command people is a person who has true power, true might.Unlike Thulsa Doom, Mises of course saw power as a dangerous and corrupting force, which is why he opposed concentrating might in the most powerful, and deadly institution in modern history: the state.
Doom too, in fairness: he was intending, at the time of his death, to sweep away all the governments of the world in an epic of murderous assassination. There is no reason to think he meant to replace them, as their continuing absence would eliminate any institution with the ability to oppose him and his cult.
Ironically that is the only defense for the existence of any state: such things are inherently evil, but they are effective forms of organization for opposing other organizations that are also evil. You end up having to set the evils against each other: the state against the corporation, the cartel, the mafia, the murderous cult.
The question is whether there is a way to organize along voluntary lines, as Conan's band of adventurers, to hold back the other evils without needing courts and police, law and taxation, prisons and gallows.
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You end up having to set the evils against each other: the state against the corporation, the cartel, the mafia, the murderous cult.
Madison wisely intended the (our) state itself to exist in tension with its own constituent members: The Whigs against the Tories; the Federalists versus the Anti-Federalists; the mercantilists against agrarians; states against the central authority. And of course the whole idea of "Factions" goes back to color wars, Red versus Blues (or Greens or Whites), in Roman chariot racing.
You might say another word about the connection between Roman color factions and contemporary political ones.
The State is just a way of organizing human beings. It's neither intrinsically good or evil, any more than a gun or automobile or whatever.
A definition of "evil" would be useful here. I'd say "evil" is any action which undermines social trust (some actions do so more than others, hence greater and lesser evils). States can certainly *engage* in evil, and have a lot more power to do so than individuals, but I wouldn't say that a State is *inherently* evil.
States can certainly *engage* in evil....
This is another misapprehension. States do nothing at all; they're merely, as noted, a means of organizing. That organization, though, is populated by particular men and women. It is those men and women who engage (no quote marks needed) in any action, and those men and women can use or abuse that organization's power to more or less good (however defined) or more or less evil (however defined).
It's important, too, to keep in mind that those definitions of good and evil, while perhaps originally the definitions of the population who created their State organization, quickly become the changing definitions of the changing men and women who populate the organization.
Eric Hines
St Augustine says that evil is, purely, a privation from the good intended by God in creation. I think the administrative nation state we have today is an evil in that pure sense. Humanity organizes naturally into families; Aristotle claims that it organizes even more naturally into polities, because (he claims) that is the only place where humanity's full range can be realized. In a polity, one can be free of oppression by other families or clans or bandits; one can enjoy a sort of equality with others that is not found in nature; one can take actions as a member of that polity to govern one's self and to express one's virtues through practical action. One can help others in the community express their own virtues by electing them to other offices to which they are well-suited.
Weber's criticism of the administrative state -- you can read my notes on it by following the links at the sidebar -- shows clear privation from these goods. The need of the elected officials to constantly run for office means that they have to defer their powers to administrators who aren't elected; this means that the good of self-governance is lost, because the people we elected don't end up being the ones with power over our lives.
The need for money for those campaigns means that the elected officials also end up chasing donations instead of doing good to deserve election; that means they don't actually end up doing even their limited duties, or exercising their limited virtues.
The need to use power to perform favors for donations is inherently corrupt. It also draws into the political class not the virtuous, but the most successful at corruption.
It also creates an administrative class that is both unelected and really powerful, thus eliminating the sort-of equality that free citizens had with each other.
Thus, all the goods intended by human nature -- according to Aristotle -- end up being achieved either not at all or only privatively. Thus, per Augustine, the state is evil: and really evil, not just rhetorically evil.
Except it's not the State doing any of that. It's the men and women populating the State. The State is just a tool.
Eric Hines
Yes, but at the same time also no. It's true that only living beings, and not formal organizations, can act -- yes, in that sense. But it's also true that the form of organization creates effects, even they aren't willed actions. One form of organization has a structure that does the one thing; the modern administrative state's structure does the other. It's not that the right people, choosing the right things, could fix it. The right people won't be successful in obtaining offices under this structure; should they by accident, they couldn't keep them over successive cycles without becoming corrupt; the elected offices don't end up having the power to fix the problems anyway because it gets delegated to administrators; and the administrators interests are necessarily separated from those of the governed so they are sorted into separate classes.
It's similar to the materialist/immaterial issue. One can say that 'only material things exist,' and in a way that seems true: everything we can observe is composed of material parts. But it really matters how those parts are organized. The same parts can be organized into a table, and it will function as a table and provide the goods for which a table was wanted. Or they can be organized into a loose heap on the floor, in which case it's all and only the same parts -- but the form of organization prevents them from attaining any of the goods that they might have if they'd been organized into a table instead of a heap.
Hold fire; I'm going to promote this discussion to its own post.
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